ARM is getting a lot of attention lately. The chip designer, whose energy efficient processor technology powers the vast majority of the world’s smartphones and tablets, is benefiting greatly from the popularity of the iPad and other ARM-based devices. Even Microsoft, a long-time x86 devotee, has jumped on the ARM bandwagon for its Windows RT operating system […]

Warmth and water… Two things that don’t fit the brisk and bone dry image of a data center. But the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), along with HP and Intel, are blazing new trails in IT efficiency with a novel data center cooling system based on warm water for a new high-performance computing (HPC) site […]

ARM processor-based cloud servers are big on potential, but for now, they fall a bit short on actually powering cloud services. That’s about to change, and quickly too, judging by the meteoric rise of the open source cloud platform that’s just now making the jump from x86 processors to ARM chips. First, a little background. […]

Remember that report about Calxeda and HP teaming up for low-power ARM servers? Well, now it’s official and it even has a name: Project Moonshot. To get the industry used to the idea of computing on servers built around ARM processors, HP is laying the groundwork with a couple of initiatives. First is Project Pathfinder, which […]

Things are getting exciting on the computer server front. For a couple of years, an Austin, Texas-based startup called Calxeda (formerly Smooth-Stone) has been making the case for energy efficient servers using ARM processors — that currently dominate the smartphone and tablet markets — as it prepared to commercialize its tech. Now it looks like […]

HP’s taking its build-a-data-center business seriously. Today the company’s Converged Infrastructure division unveiled what it’s billing as “the world’s most efficient data center,” the HP POD 240a. Or the EcoPOD as the company has taken to calling it (a naming convention I fully support). As has become the norm for modular data center vendors, the […]

Flash memory is once again taking the performance crown by enabling Violin Memory and HP to claim bragging rights today on a TPC-E benchmark. According to the companies, a Violin Memory Array in conjunction with an HP Proliant DL380 G7 server running Microsoft SQL Server 2008 set a record for a dual socket with a […]

Is another round of M&A drama about to ensue, courtesy of Compellent? First, there was the epic bidding war over DataDomain during the summer of 2009. EMC claimed victory over NetApp in that episode. Then earlier this year, HP was victorious in snatching 3PAR from Dell’s waiting hands. Now, Compellent’s latest, record-setting revenue disclosure and […]

How high will they go? HP one-upped Dell with a roughly $2.1 billion bid to snag storage virtualization and thin provisioning firm 3PAR. At stake is nothing less than cloud domination! Actually, no, but close. IT vendors are scrambling to build their cloud portfolios, which rests on offering technologies and platforms that can scale to […]

Last year, EMC and NetApp battled it out for DataDomain, whose claim to fame was a strong data deduplication portfolio. Data deduplication, as its name suggests, helps data center operators keep their energy and storage hardware costs in check by eliminating identical sets of data that would otherwise take up room on oftentimes pricey storage […]